White House budget chief Mick Mulvaney on Thursday defended the Trump administration’s proposed deep cuts to social welfare programs such as Meals on Wheels and after-school services, saying it’s unfair to taxpayers if such programs don’t show hard results.

“Meals on Wheels sounds great,” Mulvaney said during the White House news briefing, adding that “we're not going to spend [money] on programs that cannot show that they actually deliver the promises that we’ve made to people.”

Mulvaney described the budget blueprint, which calls for dramatic cuts to domestic spending programs in favor of increased funding for the military, as “one of the most compassionate things we can do.”

He explained that the budget proposal is compassionate to the taxpayer because it stops government spending on programs that he said have been ineffective.

“You're only focusing on half of the equation, right? You’re focusing on recipients of the money. We’re trying to focus on both the recipients of the money and the folks who give us the money in the first place,” Mulvaney told reporters. “And I think it's fairly compassionate to go to them and say, ‘Look, we're not going to ask you for your hard-earned money anymore … unless we can guarantee to you that that money is actually going to be used in a proper function. And I think that is about as compassionate as you can get.”